SAS For Dummies

Chapter 16

Taming the Data Beast

In This Chapter

Seeing why you should care about data warehousing

Mini-sizing with data marts: Smaller can be better

Discovering data warehousing basics for the business user

Accessing, massaging, cleaning up, and managing the various data sources that you need are critical to success with SAS. Well-managed data allows you to focus on creating cool analyses and graphs; in fact, it is often the overlooked key to success with SAS business intelligence and analytics. In many situations, individual data access and management work is a reasonable strategy. Comparatively, in many situations, a great deal of time could be saved and many headaches avoided by leveraging the techniques and tools of data warehousing. As a discipline, data warehousing is all about meeting the needs of many user groups (that is, you!) by providing a central data store that combines critical data needed from various systems in your company.

In this chapter, we review why data warehousing is important for everyone to understand, the basics of data warehousing, and the value of data marts (a mini data warehouse).

Data Warehousing: Do I Really Need to Think about This?

Consider ...